krux research
2010 Cross Industry Study
October 19, 2010 - Krux Digital
Online advertising is the revenue engine powering hundreds of thousands of websites. To earn revenue from the audiences they attract, website publishers make ad slots on their pages available to third parties such as networks, advertisers, exchanges, brokers, and measurement services. When a third party gains access to a publisher’s web page or ad slot, usually for a period measured in milliseconds, it frequently drops a ‘cookie,’ a small piece of iden- tifying code, into the browser of the publisher’s user. The cookie is what allows the third party to identify that user after he or she leaves the publisher’s site and moves on to another site.
In some cases, publishers proactively authorize trusted partners to enter their site and gain access to their users. With existing technologies, however, third parties have the ability to set, reference, and modify cookies via code on the webpage without the publisher’s consent or knowledge. The privacy implications to consumers have been well-chronicled. The implications to publishers have received less attention, but they are, we believe, material and worthy of rigorous analysis.
We have undertaken a comprehensive study of data collection activities across the digital media industry, with attention to the phenomenon we have referred to as data leakage in earlier commentary. Data leakage is when an external entity, often without a publisher’s consent, collects data about a user while the user is on the publisher’s website.
Key findings:
- 31% of all data collection was enabled by parties other than the publisher, often without their control or consent
- 55% of all companies collecting data on a website also brought in other companies to collect data as well
- 27% of all collection was conducted by parties that are potentially competitive to publishers in media or data sales
- 167 different companies were observed participating in active data collection across just fifty publisher sites, few of whom appeared to be doing so in the publishers' interest or at their request
Feel free to download the Executive Summary.
